Tape your MOUTH SHUT for BETTER SLEEP

He took magnesium supplements and melatonin. He wore eye masks, went for cold plunges and hot baths with Epson salts. He even tried sweating it out in the sauna before bed.

- MICHELE HENRY

Brodie Mackenzie created TapeHim and TapeHer after she and her husband, Phil, got better sleep when taping their mouths.

But nothing worked - and so, bereft, Phil Mackenzie, 37, a Burlington fit-fluencer, decided to tape his mouth shut.

"It seemed crazy," he said. "But I was willing to try anything." That is, he says, even though it made him look like a hostage.

No, this isn't some weird, new role-playing game. MacKenzie, a father of four kids under eight, was trying out a decades-old, but newly viral wellness trend.

Proponents say that "mouth-taping," the practice of, quite literally, using an adhesive to seal your lips shut before bed, not only induces a deeper, more restful sleep, but also allows the sleeper to enjoy hours of uninterrupted slumber, more time in REM sleep (when we dream) and, come morning, to wake up feeling refreshed, energized - and with better breath.

Gwyneth Paltrow and Ashley Graham are reportedly devotees. TikTok is alight with videos of pyjamawearing 20-somethings trying to talk through shuttered lips. And every day, it seems, up pops a new brand of mouth-tape with names like Hostage Tape and the Skinny Confidential Mouth Tape. In fact, once she saw her husband sleeping like a baby, Brodie MacKenzie, 35, tried it, loved it- and launched her own brand called TapeHer and TapeHim.

Lara Perel-Panar, a dentist at the TMJ and sleep therapy centre in Vancouver, said that while she likes to test-run many tapes on the market, mouth-taping isn't really about the tape or the mouth at all.

Rather, it's about becoming a nosebreather instead of a mouthbreather.

Nasal breathing, Perel-Panar said, is not only a more efficient and effective way to take in air, it's also easier on the body.